Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

It’s been awhile – January 2014, to be exact – since I’ve written about the importance of stick-to-it-ness. When it comes to running for your life – in your sixties, no less – it’s a lesson that deserves to be repeated.

As time goes by, so does the relatively pain-free aspect of high-mileage training. In July, while running in France, I pulled a hamstring muscle. Luckily, it wasn’t a severe strain. It slowed my training schedule, and did heal in time. These days, well into October, it feels like new.

Now it’s my right heel that’s inflamed. One of the things that I’ve written about in this space is the importance of knowing your body. When need be, I stop road training and switch to the low-impact elliptical machine. I’m deep into marathon training so as part of my regimen I’m taking anti-inflammatories for the residual pain. If the pain persists (it is a dull one when I run, on a scale of 1-10, a 2 to 3), I’ll be seeing my podiatrist before the marathon on November 15, just in case …

All of which is to say that despite the aches and pains (and an energy level that isn’t exactly what it was, say, ten years ago), I don’t miss a day of running. Or of cross-training.

Last week, our family went to Rome. The heel was sore, so instead of doing a long run, I did 20 reps up and down a 40-step staircase. Up on my toes where the inflammation didn’t hamper me. I did run through the pain, and have been running and doing low-impact workouts since we got back.

If you are going to run for your life, pain management is crucial. As is stick-to-it-ness. It’s hardest to do when you are not at your best physically. But the benefits are worth it, believe me.

Next: Running for Your Life: Roman Mood   

Running for Your Life: Canada Votes

In the United States, Harper’s is a respected progressive magazine. “Harper’s” has an entirely different connotation in Canada, my home and native land. For the past decade, Canada has been Harper’s. Stephen Harper’s, that is.

Today, Canada is voting, and if there is any social justice in the world, the country’s voters will vote Conservative Party Prime Minister Harper out of office.

I wish I were there to cast my vote for either the Liberals or the New Democratic Party. Not because I’m a big believer in politicians, or the idea that, as Lewis Lapham writes in November’s Harper’s, we – regular folks in Canada or the U.S. – can't realistically expect our vote to matter in terms of choosing democracy over concentrated wealth.

I would back the Liberals or the NDP because it would at least FEEL like the side of a civilized approach to government and public problem-solving is in charge. What a luxury to imagine the word citizen as a possible construct in a conversation. That would count for something.

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

From the master of the acerbic putdown, Evelyn Waugh, (1903-1966), best known as the author of “Brideshead Revisited,” whose work critic V.S. Pritchett remarked will delight long past his death for those who honor “the beauty of his malice,” words to borrow when you’ve been invited to something that, well, you just don’t want to attend:

“YOUR NAME HERE deeply regrets that he (she) is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.”

If only Evelyn Waugh were here to deliver on how best to skewer Donald Trump – and keep him skewered. Sigh. This from humorist Nancy Mitford: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday

There are more than a few reasons behind my October-love. It’s when baseball suddenly becomes real, like a favorite uncle who eleven months of the year is on the road, but every October he returns, refreshed with new and wildly entertaining stories to tell. I’m a Pirates fan (by default after my beloved Expos folded) so tonight (Oct. 7) is the night, which will be no horrendous loss if they fall to the Cubs, because, for God’s sake, they’re the Cubs! How can you not root for the Cubs in part of your heart – or your gut – for all those following the latest developments in the world of superorganisms http://bit.ly/1LiEgYL. This is a dated article from Michael Pollan but you get the drift …

Today also marks the opening of hockey season. In past years that delightful event has occurred on my birthday (Oct. 5), but no matter. It’s my birthday week, a Wednesday, and the Rangers are playing the ’Hawks. If only my Penguins were on against the ’Hawks, then it would make for a Pittsburgh-Chitown double-header. In any event, drop the puck. Let’s get it on!

Oh yeah, the birthday thing. Sixty. My seventh decade. On Nov. 15 I will be running in the Brooklyn Marathon, my first shot at qualifying for Boston in the 60-64 age group. I’d be in range to qualify under ideal weather conditions: 45 degrees F with a 20-mile-an-hour swirling wind that miraculously is always at my back.

I know this blog can at times sound eye-rollingly upbeat. So, cynics, pass by. This decade promises to be the best yet! Hope the same is true for you, dear reader. I know I believe it, and there is power in that.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Marathons and War

Not so long ago I wrote about Tony Judt (1948-2010) who coined the phrase the crappy generation, whose members “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, either economic nor political.”

I had Judt in mind when I was talking to my friend J last month over cocktails. When J and I get together for Hendricks martinis and dinner on the side, we often talk about running.

One thought I had during out last session was that as a member of the crappy generation I had no mass, or national, war to occupy my body and mind. So, as a way to compensate for this deficiency (after all, we are talking “crappy” here), I run marathons.

How are marathons like wars? As a group, we marathoners struggle and suffer through months of basic training to bring ourselves up to the standards of road “combat,” which is running continually for 26.2 miles. Out there on the course, we urge each other forward, like mates in the trenches. We understand, as best we can, the common enemy (especially at mile sixteen or mile twenty when we are convinced that we have nothing left.) Along the course, the civilians cheer as if to the soldiers on march to harbor and their troop ships, saying reassuring war-years-like things: “Looking great!” “We’re proud of you!” “You’re all so amazing!”

At the end of race, we have a memory and a medal to show to those at home. And, after our marathoning days are over, we put the medal in a drawer for safekeeping. When we take it out we will handle it carefully and memories of our own sacrifice and those who shared it will come flooding back.

There will be no marathon cenotaphs, no memorials built for the nameless marathoner. It is, I’m sure you agree, better that way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday!